A new law proposed today by the premier of New South Wales declares possession of the handheld lasers a serious crime, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, depending on the device’s power. Weaker lasers could carry a $5,000 fine or 2 years in jail, and there would be exemptions only for teachers, construction crews and the scientists who point out the stars on planetarium ceilings.

Behind the harshness of the proposed ban is a nightmare scenario: A passenger jet crashes after a pilot is blinded by a laser aimed at the cockpit by someone on the ground. “It is a gutless and cowardly act that could result in an horrific outcome,” Premier Morris Iemma said, according to Reuters. “It only takes a fraction of a second for a pilot to become temporarily blinded and that could have catastrophic consequences.”

The enemy now known as “laser lunatics” in Australia emerged in a string of incidents — mostly involving airline pilots, but also helicopters. Earlier this month, a 23-year-old man was sentenced to three years in prison for pointing his laser at another helicopter. The judge echoed the dire viewpoint of today’s officials, calling the crime “a disaster in the making,” The Associated Press said.

This all may sound vaguely familiar: the United States went through a similar fit in 2005. Then, the Federal Aviation Administration reported an astounding 287 cases of cockpits hit with laser beams, and the House of Representatives proposed a law against pointing the devices at planes , with fines up to $250,000 and prison terms up to five years.

But the proposed legislation, known as the Securing Aircraft Cockpits Against Lasers Act of 2005, stalled as the threat seemed to recede. The aviation agency went on to create “laser-free zones” around airports, along with an application process for anyone who wants to stage a laser light show outdoors. (Note to Vienna, Va.: Make sure to file your papers 30 days before your brand new July 4th show.)

The stalling of the bill hardly stopped the authorities from pursuing suspected laser miscreants, however. In January 2005, federal authorities decided to “make a point” with David Banach of Parsippany, N.J., as George James recounted in animated terms in The New York Times:

ON the face of it, the situation David Banach got himself into sounds like one of those off-the-wall plots from ”The Simpsons.”

Homer orders this laser pen over the Internet and takes Lisa outside to flash it around the night sky. It flashes on an aircraft. They go into the house, and soon there is a banging on the door. Homer opens it and — ”D’oh!” — there, in his front yard, are hordes of lawmen, including F.B.I. agents who arrest him for violation of the Patriot Act.

Homer gets flattened by John Ashcroft.

Mr. Banach faced up to 25 year in prison, but a judge decided a year later that two years’ probation was enough punishment for “a few moments of reckless action in an otherwise blameless life.” Today, those were precisely the moments that inspired Australian officials to drop their tolerance for lasers.

This story reeks of fighting the wrong fight, of legislators taking empty gestures to appear to be doing something substantive. While it’s certainly possible to blind someone temporarily with a laser, the odds of hitting a fast-moving aircraft 1000’s of feet in the air with a handheld laser are so miniscule as to be laughable — let alone hit a cockpit window, and do so at a shallow enough angle to proceed to hit a pilot’s eyes. Even then, temporarily blinding a pilot should yield no permanent damage; most planes are flown on automatic these days, even on final approach; in addition, there’s a 2nd person right there (co-pilot) who could take over at any time.

In the meantime, the cargo hold of that aircraft contains 100s of pounds of unscreened cargo and mail… ridiculous.

If lasers are dangerous, they need to be regulated. I am worried less about airplanes where a pilot can sustain a momentary loss of sight with minimal risk than I am worried about Clinton supporters using laser lights to blind drivers attending Obama campaign events. We cannot discount the level to which the Clinton campaign will go to attack Obama supporters.

There are already restrictions based on power levels, at least for devices sold in the US. But a mirror on a sunny day could do as much harm, as could dropping a stone from an overpass in front of a train, and you cannot hope to regulate those.

New South Wales “Australia’s largest state”? Most populous perhaps, but Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia, as well as the Northern Territory, are all bigger. Meaning it’s one of the smaller states. You wouldn’t catch a NYT journalist calling California the largest state in the Union would you?

Thanks Jeff. I’d like to add that any laser the general public gets a hold of still has a pretty divergent beam (notice the foot wide blot generated on hundred foot or so ‘targets’). This makes them all but as effective as a flashlight at a distance. Then there’s the issue of stability (not just plane speed as Jeff points out). While giving a powerpoint we all constantly move the beam around so nobody can see how shaky it is from a few feet away, and you mean to tell me that someone can hold it dead on a pilot’s eye as he moves darn near the speed of sound? No, this story signifies a terrifying level of paranoia on our own part threatening to destroy any semblance of reason we still have left. Please don’t let that happen.

The point made by Mr. Jacob Silver IS EXACTLY RIGHT. These behaviros are the result of growth and production of barbarianism. Seriously, don’t you see large numbers of crude, rude people around you, too..?

So we legislate against what might be, while completely ignoring the fact that in many states, guns are sold without even requiring an ID. I think that the laser manufacturers need to start a PAC in Washington and start lobbying for laser rights

There you have it, if y’all give away your right to use guns, you’ll lose the right to those nifty laser pointers too. Cos, you know, you could blind a pilot, not that that’s happened yet. You’d have to have unbelievable accuracy anywhere but at the airport, but stranger stuff has happened.

So someone point out to the pansies running Down Under that kitchen knives are terribly, terribly unsafe. You could hurt someone with them.

Baseballs too… hurl a baseball at a cockpit window when the jet is landin and, if ya score a bullseye (in the strike zone), you’ve killed everyone on board. Ban baseballs now! Lethal as a laser.

I feel really obligated to comment. I know several optical/laser scientists. They actually use lasers powerful enough to blind people in their experiments. But these devices cost THOUSANDS of dollars and are big and very heavy. So only with great difficulty could someone accurately point this into a plane or helicopter to blind a pilot. The small hand-held lasers are NOT powerful enough to actually blind someone, pilots face more danger from the sun than hand-held laser pointers. This is so totally bogus.

What’s more dangerous – tens of thousands of people driving our roads at night in very close quarters at reasonable speeds being momentarily blinded by the newer tungsten halogen headlights without the benefit of extra controls and a co-pilot or the momentary blindness of a pilot flying well over 600 mph thousands of feet above ground with little chance of another plane being anywhere near and having a co-pilot with a complete set of redundant controls? Sounds like we need to make more hospitals and prisons to keep up with this insanity!

We should really be focusing on banning anyone eating a Banana within 5000 feet of a coyote who is hunting birds with dynamite. When they slip and the dynamite explodes in their face their little wiskers get blackened and their ears all bent up.

I’d say I don’t want to live in Australia, but the northeast US is no better.

I think Jeff (#4) has it right: the ‘illumination’ risk is only evident on takeoff or final approach… and even then, why bother with a laser when a high-collimation halogen light will do the job?
You know, the kind often found in Sharper Image catalogs.
The kind that could be disguised as – or, in fact, is – photographic equipment… drop by your local library and read through Tom Clancy’s ‘Debt of Honor’ sometime. Which, as I recall, he wrote _back in 1994_.
For all of that, however, I agree that the proposed legislation is an extreme overreaction.

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